Readers of Augustine out there will enjoy the rich irony of this. The people over at the Washington Post have--no doubt unwittingly--tried casting a positive light on the amare amabam of Confessions, Book III. It's an article of love advice from Hallmark Channel actors--the usual tripe.

The passage of the Confessions in question (which might also be familiar to fans of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland): "I came to Carthage, where a cauldron of shameful loves seethed and sounded about me on every side. I was not yet in love but I was in love with love [amare amans], and by a more hidden want I hated myself for wanting little. I sought for something to love, for I was in love with love [amare amans, again]; I hated security, and a path free from snares." The point being that Augustine, afraid of real commitment, chose not to love people but instead the subjective experiences of attraction and intimacy, which of course only fed his frustration. He was in love with love, not with an actual person.

Augustine continues, with what could just as easily describe many of our popular entertainers: "Therefore, I defiled the very source of friendship by the filth of concupiscence, and its clear waters I befouled with the lust of hell. Yet foul and vicious as I was, with overflowing vanity, I took pride in being refined and cultured." One need only think of the recently uncovered rape culture of Hollywood (as if there had ever been a doubt), whose members have--for decades now!--arrogated the role of our moral and cultural educators.

To finish the passage, here Augustine remarks on how its downright providential that superficial love, unlike the genuine article, always fails: "I plunged headlong into love, whose captive I desired to be. But my God, my mercy, with how much gall did you sprinkle all that sweetness of mine, and how good you were to do it! For I was loved, and I had gained love's bond of joy. But in my joy I was bound about with painful chains of iron, so that I might be scourged by burning rods of jealousy, and suspicion, and fear, and anger, and quarreling."

This year, Valentine's Day coincides with Ash Wednesday. Thank God. I hate Valentine's Day for all its mercantilised erotomania, the awkward neckties, the hasty reservations, the second guessing--so much second guessing--the glaring fact that you can't pin the ineffable motions of the heart to a calendar. I suppose its cute when the darlings come home bearing their Valentine construction for you. In fact, it's very cute. But isn't it also kind of weird that the images they have cut and glued together ultimately derive from adult romance? Is romantic love really the primary analogate of human love? And isn't this confusion only heightened by the school mandate that everyone give everyone a valentine treat, presumably for the same reason that zero-sum games are increasingly discouraged? What precisely is all this supposed to inculcate? Romantic love is after all necessarily exclusive. It's a mystery to me, the whole thing's a mystery to me.

If scientists and science enthusiasts took the content of their beliefs seriously things would be very different. In the Age of Laplace they would have realized that, all things being determined, it wouldn't matter whether people believed in scientific progress at all: beliefs only have causes, not effects, and so the great efforts to rid the world of superstition and make it comfortably secular were pointless, if inevitable. Why argue that we ought to adopt science as our guiding light if there is no such thing as guidance at all, if instead all we do or do not believe--and argue--was pre-programmed in some dark and forgotten aeon? In the Age of Carnap, where the reduction of all thought to observational atoms ruled out the normative charge of any thought, why work towards a socialist future as so many of the Logical Positivists did? There could be no 'good' socialist future over and against a 'bad' capitalist past, becaue there is no 'good' and 'bad' in the first place.

Today it is the Multiverse that has charmed so many a snake, among them Max Tegmark, whose raptures on his multiversal twin make us pine for the austere heyday of positivism. Let's start with the fact that mulitiversalism is a speculation upon a speculation, the far and dubious consequence of one possible interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is itself a theory not only unreconcilable (so far) with relativity, but moreover known to break down in conditions approaching a singularity. If falsification is the criteria of science (as your run of the mill scientist holds), then quantum physics is not a theory at all but a best effort at bunching together some pretty weird phenomena. But even if we grant that quantum physics is a real scientific theory, does multiversalism commit the fallacy of composition? If particles take every path, is it valid to conclude that everything takes every path, because everything is made of particles? Ever see a toaster bilocate? Or might there be emerging properties that preclude this? Try, I defy you, to describe mammalian reproduction strictly in terms of particle physics. Whatever it is you end up saying, it won't have anything to do with reproduction.

But let's, just for the sake of maximal generosity, grant that there is a multiverse. What are the practical upshots of this? How will this inform our everyday? I submit things don't fare much better than with Laplace: why do anything, if the very fact that we could means that in some other universe someone will? In fact, if we do x, then those in that universe will then necessarily not do x, and we will thereby deprive them of what we have--a situation which would be no less than theft! Or, not wishing to neglect the poor and downtrodden of other worlds, we could forego doing x in an act of charity to our multiversal neighbor...but then that would preclude his option to be charitable to us, right? Or am I committing an error in assuming that choice here precedes and precludes choice there? Or more likely, do I falsely assume that there's anything like choice at all either here or there in the first place? I mean, if every path is taken, then every path is taken period. My own desires, or the illusion that I am taking action, has nothing to do with anything. Which means, as with Laplace, that there is no reason at all to promote Multiverse Theory or pat ourselves on the back that we were clever enough to come up with it in the first place. Which means that Tegmark & Co. are caught up in performative contradictions. Unless, of course, you grant that they can't help it, as it is the dispensation of some dark aeon.

But let's take one more stab at outdoing ourselves with charitable interpretation. Let's grant that there is a multiverse and that Tegemark has done us a favor in bringing it to light. Does this mean that science has conquered all, and forced the last vestiges of superstiton from our midst once and for all? Well, if the multiverse is, then the multiverse is, which means that each universe in the multiverse is, which means that the Problem of the One and the Many is still very much alive. So much is metaphysically indefeasible. Whatever the advantages or distractions of empirical progress, we still have to know how being and plurality can both be true, when prima facie the only thing to cause plurality of being would be an addition to being from outside of being...and outside of being is nothing. Which puts us with Parmenides at the headwaters of a very different tradition...

So runs a common strain of cognitive defeatism. Claws, ovipositors, mandibles, the mind--these are nothing but best-effort adaptations to this or that environmental niche. But first, note that we can only know this to the extent that the theory of evolution itself is certain--but then the theory of evolution would be just the sort of thing a mind could not properly pronounce on: niche-adaptive tools do not produce certainties. So in effect we cannot be certain that we cannot be certain of anything. And certainly the last thing we should do is abduct this probability-tool from its proper environs--mammoths, campfires, those theories that have a chance of dying in our stead--and direct it towards own inner workings. Using a saw to saw a saw weakens the one and blunts the other. Bad enough. But the self-observing mind is recursive, uncertainty compounding with every reflective cycle. So the best thing to do is forego our vain ruminations, accept only those we cannot do without and otherwise let the mind attend to those things it's optimized for. Which most certainly would not include trying to call the mind a tool, because as a tool, this is precisely what the mind cannot do. ... But what's this? Are we deferring to nature to dictate norms?...isn't that just the sort of thing the naturalism first of Spinoza and later of Darwin & Co. sought to overcome?

The Bookmonger has a series of podcasts interviewing influencial authors on the right, including R. R. Reno, Michael Novak, Roger Scruton and Yuval Levin.

Also check out Commentary Magazine's article on Tolkein's largely sympathetic portrayal of the Jews as the dwarves in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This would serve as a foil to the nasty depiction Richard Wagner gives them as the Nibelungen in his famous Ring Cycle. For details on the latter, consult Wagner Androgyne by Jean-Jacques Nattiez. The remarkable thing is how well all these creations work even when you're blind to their hidden political dimensions. (Note: overtly political art usually sucks...someone ought to tell the Nobel committee...)

The Miracle Detective, Randall Sullivan. A Rolling Stone journalist picks up a thread in Washington state that leads him to Medjugorje in the midst of the Bosnian war to describe the ongoing purported appearances of the Virgin Mary to six local kids, and in the process to plumb the depths of the natural, the supernatural, the delusional, the hysterical, and the paranormal, all with generous doses of sympathy and skepticism and a nose for politics and intrigue. The book culminates in an extended interview with Benedict Groeschel, which lays out the most mature treatment of the Catholic Church’s take on the miraculous I have yet encountered.

Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, read by Kenneth Branagh. Anything Branagh touches turns to gold, no less this one of my very favorite books.

Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton. Explores and assesses the string of surrogates for God—reason, art, culture, Geist, morality, etc.—that have arisen to take his place following his purported demise. Fascinating, erudite, but I’m still trying to figure out why he wrote it in the first place.

The Good Nurse, Charles Graeber. Tells the story of Charles Cullen, the nurse arrested in 2003 for murdering hospital patients, killing perhaps hundreds. And of the labyrinthine investigation and cover-up by the hospitals involved.

Primetime Propaganda: The True Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, Ben Shapiro. A Manichean rendering of TV history, exposing—to great effect—the downright antipathy towards conservative America held by many TV moguls, and their attempts to reprogram us.

The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and The Rise of a Shadow Government, Mike Lofgren. A Beltway insider attempts to answer how the two parties, embroiled as they ostensibly are in the culture wars, can suddenly unite on matters so immense and consequential as Libya. Points towards the existence of a sort of military-contractor-Silicone Valley-Wall Street-government agency complex.

Early Christian Fathers, Cyril Richardson. You need to read Clement, Ignatius, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus before declaring the Real Presence, the hierarchy, the virgin birth, the efficacy of the sacraments, the apostolic succession, etc., to be later medieval inventions.

I finally finished Boardwalk Empire last night. I had bogged down in Season 3 at the point where everyone seemed to have become irredeemably stupid. But after some nudges from friends I pushed through to the end. Had I not finished it, or even if I had given up in Season 5, I would have lumped it together with The Wire as a protracted study of bad people acting badly, from every social stratum and walk of life, on either side of the law, for every possible reason; as it were, lifting the floorboards of the familiar to see what swarms of vermin scuttle beneath, or in Adorno's words the 'horror teeming under the stone of culture'; an indulgent chronicle of gruesome and unconscionable deeds perpetrated by those long resigned to universal corruption, or those who never cared in the first place.

But the final moments of Boardwalk Empire cast the entire show retrospectively in a classical light. Arthur dies by the fruit of an early incestuous relationship with Morgana le Fay and with him the unity of the kingdom he had devoted his life to establishing. The young Nucky Thompson's deliberate collusion with evil, a single act taken for the sake of his own advancement, literally spawned the child whose child, like another Mordred, ultimately did him in. Of course, what dies with Nucky is but the remains of the petty fiefdom he was able to construct in Atlantic City by ruthlessly exploiting the demand for drink during Prohibition. But the basic moral structure is the same as in Malory: our own evil undoes us, just as we would expect in an ordered cosmos. And then as now, if this tale be delivered on streams of blood, well then all the better.

For the record, I thoroughly enjoyed The Wire, and perhaps I go too far in declaring it amoral. Season 2 was worthy of classical tragedy, telling of a man undone by an unchecked urge to fatherly protection. But that was only an episode within a larger tale that cannot abide Aufhebung. How exactly could you boil the drug wars down to a moral? Doesn't the ethically ambiguous career of Jimmy McNulty rather mirror both sides of the law in Baltimore? Isn't the closing sequence's nod to the ewige Wiederkehr, the eternal recurrence of the same, the only conceivable way to end that which never ends?

Last night in flipping through channels I landed on The French Connection, spending a few minutes before deciding it really wasn't the thing to have on with my 7 year old in the room. I had been trying to explain to her what was going on, why the sham raid and brutal interrogation at the bar, and why the two detectives were quarreling insolently with their chief. Of the detectives, she asked "are those the good guys or the bad guys"? From the mouths of babes indeed.

Nihilism is where leftism goes to die. For if bourgeois morality gets swept away and the grand utopia fails to materialize, what else is there to do?

In his speech on Tuesday President Obama outlined four measures to reduce gun violence in the US. Two of these I gladly welcome. Requiring all dealers regardless of venue to be licensed and conduct background checks is simply a matter of consistency. And better enforcement of existing laws simply makes sense—it would have prevented Dylann Roof from getting a gun. The proposal to bring technology into mix, however, is somewhat more complicated. A find-my-rifle app might help recover lost and stolen weapons, but bringing firearms online would also expose them to malware and unauthorized remote access. But on the other hand fingerprint recognition could make stolen firearms worthless on the streets.

This brings us to the measure concerning mental health: the president would like to see federal mental health records submitted to the background check system. On first glance it makes good sense to consider one’s state of mind when handing them a firearm. If a friend has deposited weapons with you when in his right mind but asks them back after going insane, you might consider other matters, such as your debts, of secondary importance. At any rate, that’s what Socrates argued in the Republic, and Obama follows him: the unhinged should be unarmed. Given that mental health professionals are already mandatory reporters to other official entities such as Child Protective Services, this one addition seems innocuous enough.

A possible wrinkle in this proposal is that the prospect of losing access to guns might dissuade gun lovers from seeking help when they hit turbulence in their personal lives. But the larger concern here centers around the right to privacy. Recall that the right to privacy is what prevailed in the Roe v Wade decision: doctor-patient confidentiality trumps whatever rights the unborn might have to continue as they were unharmed. But in Obama’s proposal an opposite principle emerges: the very possibility of violence trumps doctor-patient confidentiality. Nor is this the first time this administration has called the inviolability of privacy into question: the president’s proposal to collect health care records already subordinated privacy to the call for shovel-ready jobs.

So which is it? Where exactly does our privacy rank next to public safety and the common good? Do we arm the next Adam Lanza, the next James Eagan Holmes, or do we admit that Justice Blackmun built his majority opinion on sand?

Between following such different thinkers as Rémi Brague and Jean-Luc Nancy I had gotten the impression that "individual" is a quintessentially modern term, in keeping with the modernist trend of social atomism. Working through the text selections in Meissen's Scholastic Latin I am beginning to have second thoughts:

Scruton has his claws out again, now perhaps more than ever: through the coercive methods of obscurantist Newspeak, which in “[protecting] ideology from the malicious attacks of real things”, in careful avoidance of “any encounter with reality or any exposure to the logic of rational argument”, in thus cleaving the world into the believers and the guilty, academics have managed to monopolize learning and culture, have styled themselves spokesmen for a working class they’ve never bothered listening to, have mustered solidarity, again not by any coherent means, but by demonizing the old standard scapegoat: the bourgeoisie, with its repressive mediocrity, its rule of law, its capitalist economy. The same basic fare, that is, that we find in Roger Kimball (The Long March) and Paul Johnson (Intellectuals), only a whole lot brainier. I picked it up in part to see how it would compare to these other contributions to the genre. But moreover I wanted to see whom in particular Scruton would single out as blameworthy, and to get his version of the skinny on their works. Because if Scruton can do anything, it’s boiling heady stuff down to its essence. (His Modern Philosophy, an Introduction and Survey is pretty breathtaking in this regard.)

In Scruton’s assessment, the New Left does one better than yesterday’s attacks on the bourgeoisie: “The liberation advocated by left-wing movements today does not mean simply freedom from political oppression or the right to go about one’s business undisturbed. It means emancipation from the ‘structures’: from the institutions, customs and conventions that shaped the ‘bourgeois’ order, and which established a shared system of norms and values at the heart of Western society.” Which is, of course, profoundly at odds with Scruton’s traditionalist sensibilities. British conservatism, he tells us, “is a politics of custom, compromise and settled indecision”, which, like a friendship “has no overriding purpose, but changes from day to day, in accordance with the foreseeable logic of a conversation.” A sort of principled lack of principle, one might say, which for my money doesn’t make much sense, or at least isn’t so terribly credible: because to defer to tradition is to defer to its principles. And if anything, traditions seem to be brimming with principles, even if they must be teased out.

In fact, this latter point turns out to be central to Scruton’s critique of Dworkin’s radical legal activism. (To be fair, not all on Scruton’s list of enemies hide behind the obfuscation of Newspeak, Dworkin and Rorty being notable exceptions.) Contra Dworkin, law is not so much made as discovered. “…the existence of law is presupposed in the very project of living in society – or at least, in a society of strangers. Law is real, though tacit, long before it is written down, and it is for the judge to discover the law, by examining social conflicts and laying bare the shared assumptions that permit their resolution.” Stopping short of calling them universal, Scruton calls laws thus discovered ‘natural’. But whatever his affinity for the natural law tradition (he spares no kind words for the Scholastic tradition in his discussion of Badiou), that we ought to ferret out the laws implicit in our received modes of living is clearly a principle all its own.

But let us pause and take a closer look at the formidable can of worms that Scruton has only half opened. Clearly, tacit legal precedent cannot be the sole guide for pronouncing law. Any complex society inherits multiple streams of cultural practice that are not easily harmonized. And, besides, there is nothing about precedent that guarantees justice. How many past cultural practices, including laws, were responses to situations and exigencies that no longer hold? But on the other hand, it makes just as little sense to hand the burden of crafting entirely new laws over to the priestly caste of lawyers, or to what amounts to a largely self-selected group of like-minded individuals schooled in roughly the same way, and subject to seduction by popular in-group trends (that go beyond choice of suits and German automobiles). Regarded as such, the lawyer class constitutes nothing more than yet another square on the chessboard of possible Weltanschauungen, and needs to go a lot farther than it currently does in justifying its pronouncements. Because the Jedi mind-tricks we occasionally get from the likes of Justice Kennedy fail to satisfy.

Regardless. Scruton continues: in asserting ‘structures’ to be inherently unjust, the New Left effectually burdens any inherited pattern of life—Scruton lists custom, institution, law, hierarchy, tradition, distinction, rule and piety, and later “Parliament and the common law courts; spiritual callings associated with churches, chapels, synagogues and mosques; schools and professional bodies; private charities, clubs, and societies; Scouts, Guides and village tournaments; football teams, brass bands and orchestras; choirs, theatre-groups and philately groups”—with the onus of justifying its existence. Never mind that the twin goals of liberty and equality can never be reconciled (“how do we stop the ambitious, the energetic, the intelligent, the good-looking and the strong from getting ahead…?”) Paired with the elusive ideal of equality, “‘social justice’ becomes a barely concealed demand for the ‘clean sweep’ of history that revolutionaries have always attempted.”

(But wait, didn’t he just say that emancipation from ‘structures’ is a distinguishing mark of the New, as opposed to the Old, Left? Or is “eradicating structures” somehow different than “making a clean sweep of history”? Either way, the prospects for stamp collectors are looking dim!)

And what’s at the bottom of this radicalist urge? Driving the whole machine, Scruton tells us, both the Old Left and the New, is the “resentment of those who control things”. And this is interesting, because ever since my first serious foray into recent American history (Oxford History of the United States, Book 11: The United States from Watergate to Bush Vs. Gore) I have been in the habit of descrying resentment rather at the heart of the American right: the modern Republican party gets its start with the desertion of disgruntled Dixiecrats, religious conservatives shocked out of quiescence by Roe v. Wade, businessmen frustrated by regulation; and continues with exasperation at such things as the long arm of the PC police, judicial legislation surrounding Obamacare and Obergefell, loose enforcement of immigration laws…and for that matter, at the near total surrender of universities to leftist ideology, which is the entire motive behind Fools Frauds and Firebrands itself.

Resentment, then, is more universal than Scruton lets on. But what happens when we cancel resentment out of both sides of the equation? In the case of the right, as we have seen, Scruton champions the authentic diversity of the “little platoons” that constitute the stuff of actual life and actual people, and the frameworks necessary to mediate their actual goings-on with each other. In the case of the New Left, Scruton seems to identify another factor, aside from resentment, at work: “The generation of the 1960s was not disposed to ask the fundamental question how social justice and liberation could be reconciled. It wished only for the theories, however opaque and unintelligible, that would authorize its opposition to the existing order.” But maybe this is just another expression of a fundamental disdain for authority. Vanity, the pride of life, the first and greatest sin. And if this is really what Scruton sees beneath the “nonsense machine” of the left, then what we have in our hands is in fact another, albeit vastly more erudite, installment of Johnson’s Intellectuals. And for my money that’s something we could use more of.

Works at what? Making us more chaste, more pious? More devoted to the coming revolution? to the thousand year Reich? Don't you have to have criteria for selecting what is worthwhile, criteria that precede whatever it is that's supposed to "work"?

Flipping around in Scruton's Modern Philosophy, an Introduction and Survey​ I find myself vindicated:

Simple definitions of truth in terms of utility seem transparently absurd...Obviously, if we say that a belief is true when useful, we must know what we mean by 'useful'. Anyone seeking a career in an American university will find feminist beliefs useful, just as Marxist beliefs were useful to the university apparatchik in the Soviet Union (not to speak of Britain or Italy). But this hardly shows those beliefs to be true. So what do we mean by 'useful'? One suggestion is: part of a successful scientific theory. But what makes a theory successful? (Marxism was successful, if you mean that it was spread to a large number of beliebers.) Some say that a successful theory leads to true predictions. But if we take that line, we end by defining utility in terms of truth. Indeed, it is hard to find a plausible pragmatism that does not come to this conclusion: that a true proposition is one that is useful in the way that true propositions are useful. Impeccable, but vacuous. (pp.104-5)